


Starting Again

by Lyri



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Dawn has always been alive, F/M, I promise I AM a Bangel I don't know what happened, Riley doesn't know, because I like writing for her, season 4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:00:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27068293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyri/pseuds/Lyri
Summary: It's Christmas Eve dinner, and there's an unexpected, but not unwelcome, guest.
Relationships: Riley Finn/Buffy Summers, Xander Harris/Anya Jenkins
Kudos: 3





	Starting Again

**Author's Note:**

> This is yet another prompt for my Bingo card, this time, 'mistletoe'. I don't know what happened really, or why my brain went here, but this was a lot of fun to write.

  


“Seriously? Mistletoe?” Buffy Summers asks as she watches Xander Harris stand on a dining room chair and hang the festive sprig above the entry way to the dining room while her younger sister, Dawn, looks on. Or 'supervises' as she insists is what she's actually doing.

Xander shrugs as he jumps down. “I just do as my ladies doth command.” He gestures at Dawn, then Buffy herself and finally Willow, Anya and Buffy's mom, Joyce, who are setting out food on the dining room table. He sighs. “I miss men.”

Buffy arches an eyebrow and looks up at the mistletoe again. She laughs as Xander blushes.

“I'd be okay with that.” 

Buffy twirls, startled, and finds Anya standing behind her, staring at Xander with a wicked look in her eyes.

“Um, gulp?” Xander says, paling.

“And that's my cue to get the actual child the hell away from this abomination of a conversation,” Buffy says. She grabs Dawn by the shoulders and steers her around the grossness and back to the dining room.

“Well, now that Dawn has officially been scarred for life even more, what's next?”

Joyce smiles and caresses Dawn's hair. “I think we're pretty much all set up. We're just waiting for the rest of our guests. Oh, Buffy, could you make sure the CD player is all set up? We don't want to run out of music during dinner.”

Buffy smiles and heads for the corner of the room, where a pile of random Christmas music CD's are already loaded into the multi disc CD player. “Who else did you invite?” she asks over her shoulder. Buffy didn't realize they knew enough people to have a Christmas dinner party.

“Giles, obviously,” Willow answers, folding napkins, “and I think there's a few other people coming.”

Buffy groans. “Please don't tell me you invited Spike. I mean, Thanksgiving was awful. I don't want to repeat that. I fact, I don't ever want to share a meal with that limey bastard ever again.”

“This one will be better because I'm there,” Dawn says confidently. “Because I am the best.”

Buffy smiles and presses a kiss to her baby sister's head and counts the number of seats around the table. Eight. Buffy, Dawn, Willow, Xander, Anya, Giles and Joyce make seven, which means that whoever is sitting in seat number eight is the surprise guest.

Buffy takes a few moments to wonder if Willow is dating someone. Her breakup with Oz was hard on her, what with the werewolf sexing and the attacking and the killing and the leaving.

It was all very traumatic.

But Willow hadn't mentioned meeting anyone knew. In fact, ever since Oz left, Willow had done nothing but work on her magic, growing more powerful even in the short time she'd been working on it.

That spell where she'd made Buffy fall in love with Spike was both spectacular in it's power and utterly, utterly horrifying.

Willow had burned that spell as soon as they were all back to their senses. All of their senses.

So, no, it probably wasn't Willow who'd brought a date. Xander _had_ brought a date, so the mystery guest probably didn't have anything to do with him. Which left two possibilities. Giles, or, the trauma inducing option, Buffy's mom herself had invited someone into her home to have Christmas Eve dinner with her daughters and their friends.

Flashbacks of Ted almost knock Buffy off her feet and she lowers herself into a convenient chair.

Once Joyce found out about everything, Buffy had explained about Ted, the robot and the dead wives in the closet, all of it. Joyce had been horror-stricken at the truth, blaming herself for falling for a robot and putting Buffy in that position and putting both of her daughters at risk from homicidal Robo-Ted.

It had taken a while for Buffy to convince Joyce that it wasn't her fault and that Ted was just that good at seducing women, which, ew, but Joyce was completely traumatized by the whole thing, and while she never brought a guy home after Ted, Buffy knows that there was still a guy or two Joyce had dinner or drinks with.

Until after that conversation, anyway, when all dating apparently ceased completely. Which probably means Guest Number Eight isn't her invitee.

Which leaves Giles. Which, ew, again. But it's probably more probable than Dawn bringing a date.

But, considering the Hellmouth and what it likes to do to get under Buffy's skin, she's not ruling it out just yet.

The oven timer chimes and Joyce smiles as Dawn lets out a little squeak of delight as she follows her mother to the kitchen to get the turkey from the oven.

Willow takes the seat across the table from Buffy and smiles at her. “You okay?”

“Shouldn't I be asking you that question?”

Willow shrugs. “Our first Christmas as single gals. So I thought I'd check in, see how you're doing.”

It's Buffy's turn to shrug. “I don't know. I'm okay, I guess. Seeing Angel after Thanksgiving, even for just those few minutes, kinda shook me a little. Or a lot.” She takes a deep breath. “But, I think I'm in a good place, you know? I'll always love Angel, he's my soulmate and he always will be, but we know we can't be together. And until we figure something out, something to make me immortal or make Angel human, we'll just have to stay away from each other.” Buffy gives Willow a look. “I hope we figure it out before I start going gray or get winkles.”

“That won't matter. You'll probably not live that long anyway.”

Buffy sighs at the interruption while Willow throws Anya a glare.

“Honey, we talked about tact, right?” Xander says with a nervous lilt to his tone.

Anya frowns. “Yes, but it's true. Buffy is the Slayer and Slayers don't live long. I'm over eleven hundred years old and I've met a lot of Slayers in my time and Buffy's one of the oldest I've ever heard of, never mind met. In fact, I've only heard of one who was older than Buffy is now when she died, and that was a a girl in the Seventies. The nineteen seventies.”

Buffy just blinks at her for a second. “Well, this is has been a delightful Christmas Eve dinner conversation, my impending death, but I think I'm going to go see if my mom will let me drink all the wine.”

“And I'm going to go answer the door,” Xander says before the knocking on the door had even concluded. The two of them depart, leaving Anya staring blankly after both of them.

“Everything okay, sweetheart?” Joyce asks as Buffy collapses on the kitchen island. 

“Anya likes to talk about my death a lot. I think I should be worried. Can we make sure she doesn't have access to anything I eat or drink?”

Joyce laughs like it's the funniest thing she's heard in a while.

“Ah, good evening,” a voice says from the doorway and Buffy turns to see Giles standing there, holding some sort of plant and a bag of gifts.

“Rupert!” Joyce exclaims. She hustles forward and take the plant when he extends it. “How lovely!”

“Yeah, a gift that takes work,” Buffy quips, enjoying the blush that creeps up Giles' neck.

The former Watcher hefts the bag still in his hands. “Well, uh, I did bring other, less time consuming presents.”

Buffy narrows her eyes playfully. “We'll see about that.”

Her mother hips checks her and Buffy doesn't move an inch. “Be nice,” she scolds, setting the plant in the sink for now.

“I'll put these with the other gifts for later,” Willow says, appearing from nowhere and removing the bag from Giles' hands and taking it to the living room to put the gifts under the tree with the others.

“What did you do with the pale one?” Xander calls from the other room, making everyone laugh.

“I, uh, I locked him in the bathroom,” Giles answers. “Of course, I'm under no illusion that he'll actually still be in that room when I return home and I'll probably have to brave a trip to Home Depot at some point after tomorrow to fix my broken lock, but...out of sight, out of mind, as they say.”

Buffy nods. “If only that were true for all aspects of Spike. If I could just pretend he doesn't exist, maybe he won't.” A metaphorical light bulb went off over her head. “I wonder if I asked nicely, would Willow redo the spell she did last week and we could all forget about Spike.”

“NO!” Willow shouts from the living room, making Buffy pout.

“Aw, come on, Will! It could be like my Christmas present!”

“I already bought you an actual Christmas gift and I can't keep it because you have ridiculously tiny feet.”

That perks Buffy up. “You bought me shoes?!”

“Why doesn't everyone take their seats?” Joyce suggests, her motherly authority cutting through the air in the room. “The sooner we eat, the sooner you can find out what Willow, and everyone else, got you.”

There's a scuffle as everyone moves around the dining room, finding their place, while Buffy and her mother plate the turkey and Buffy carries it easily to the table.

She's just setting the platter down when there's one last knock at the door.

Dawn scrambles from her seat next to Buffy and rushes for the door before anyone else can get there.

Buffy does her best to ignore her curiosity and busies herself with pouring water for herself and Dawn, while her mother and Giles argue about whether or not they should say grace.

“Little Jewish girl sitting right here,” Willow reminds everyone, raising her hand.

“And yet you still came to Christmas Eve dinner,” Xander points out.

“I like Joyce's green bean casserole,” Willow answers, her nose in the air. “And pie.”

“Buffy!” Dawn's voice screams from the hallway. “Someone brought a boy and he knows your name!”

Buffy frowns in confusion and glances at the others around the table as she gets to her feet, takes in the gleeful expression on Anya's face, notices that her mother, Giles and Xander looks just as perplexed as Buffy herself and that Willow looks extremely guilty but is doing her best to hide it.

“Excuse me,” she says politely and tries not to hurry as she makes her way to the front door.

“Riley?” she says, startled to find her Psyche TA, Riley Finn, standing on the porch with a bottle of wine and a bouquet of flowers. “What are you doing here?”

It's Riley's turn to frown. “Willow invited me. She said she was passing along your message. Did you not...did you not know I was coming?”

Buffy smiles forcefully. “Oh, um, of course. Obviously. I...it's just been such a crazy...day, you know, cooking, decorating.”

“Killing things,” Dawn butts in, earning a glare from her older sister. She just smiles innocently.

“Killing things?” Riley repeats, looking nervous.

Buffy's laugh sounds ridiculously fake, even to her own ears. “She means spiders. We had big...spiders earlier.”

“That's our Buffy, the Spider Slayer,” Dawn quips, then lets out a strangled yelp as someone drags her backwards and away from the front door. Buffy doesn't even look to see who does it. She's too busy staring at Riley.

Riley falters. “Should I...? Did I get it wrong? Was Willow just being polite?” He cocks a thumb over his shoulder. “Should I go?”

“NO!” Buffy says, reaching out to take hold of Riley's arm. “No, of course you shouldn't go. We've set a place for you.”

Riley smiles and allows her to pull him inside and Buffy closes the door behind them. 

“I'll take those.” Buffy turns to see that Dawn has escaped her captor and she watches as her younger sister plucks the flowers from Riley's hands and sprints off towards the kitchen. “Pretty!”

“Uh, this way,”

“Oops, watch out,” Willow says and Buffy looks over at her, only to see her best friend pointing above her and Riley's head. Buffy feels all the color drain from her face, but she follows Willow's gaze upwards until her eyes land on the mistletoe hanging neatly in the middle of the entryway.

“You have to kiss now,” Anya says, somewhat forcefully. “It's the law.”

“It's not the law, sweetie,” Xander corrects, “it's just kind of a tradition.”

“They still have to,” Anya replies and Buffy just wants the ground to open up and swallow her.

“You don't...” Riley starts, drawing her attention. “It's just a silly thing, we don't have to.”

Buffy looks up at him, then turns to look across the room, first to her mother, then to Giles, and finally, Willow. They all know how hard it was on her, when Angel turned his back to her in the parking lot of the still smoldering high school and walked out of her life for the foreseeable future, and they all look back at her with sympathetic looks on their faces, like they understand what she's feeling, but they want her to move on anyway.

And they have a point. She can't just sit around and wait for the day Angel comes striding back into her life. If that day ever comes. 

But Riley paints a very real picture of what it would be like for Buffy to take that first step away from her past and towards her future. And he could be a good future, solid and dependable and simple. As harsh as that sentiment may seem, Riley Finn would definitely be the easier choice.

Of course, at some point down the line, Buffy's going to die anyway, or get seriously hurt trying to save the world – again – and she's going to have to come clean. And on that day, she'll either watch someone else she cares about deeply walk away from her, or she gets the white picket fence life she's always dreamed off.

It's a difficult prospect to face, but as the saying goes, the hardest part of ending is starting again, so Buffy rises up onto the very tips of her tip-toes and presses a light kiss to a shocked Riley's lips.

It's not romantic, not really, there's nothing sexual or even meaningful about the kiss. But it is something and Buffy can see that something reflected in Riley's eyes when she pulls back to look at him.

In the background, Dawn's is cackling with laughter, Anya is still muttering about a law and possibly something about being around when the tradition actually started while Joyce and Xander do their best to shut her up.

“Let's eat,” Buffy says loudly, when it looks like Riley's about to pour his heart out or something, so she just takes the bottle of wine he's still holding and guides him to the free space at the table, that just so happens to be directly across from her own seat. Buffy retakes her own seat and next to her, Willow elbows her in the ribs.

“Okay?” she asks under her breath.

Buffy smiles and looks around the table at her family and Riley. The bickering is still going on, Giles has talked Joyce out of saying Grace, mostly for Willow's sake, while Xander quietly tries to remind Anya that there's a civilian among them and she should probably not mention having Christmas dinner with Queen Victoria back in the day.

“Yeah,” she says, smiling back at Willow. “I think I'm okay. I'll be even better when I see what kind of shoes you bought me.”

Willow lifts her plate to accept the slices of turkey that Joyce has carved for her. “I didn't just get you shoes.”

Buffy blushes to the roots of her hair and avoids looking towards the other side of the table.

“Yeah, I know.”

  



End file.
